December 31, 2008
Sentences in 1K
Sentences
By Charles O. Hartman and Hugh Kenner
Sun and Moon Press
New American Poetry Series: 18
1995
84 p.
Sentences begins.
money must
Sentences
Parsing
Sentences
Sentences
Sentences for love forsaken.
To write Sentences, Hartman and Kenner took 457 19th-century “Sentences for Analysis and Parsing, Thayer Street Grammar School” and providentially generated an intermediate text, using Claude Shannon’s Markov chain technique as implemented in TRAVESTY by Hugh Kenner and Joseph O’Rourke. The resulting text was corrected and used as input to Hartman’s program DIASTEXT, which carried out diastic selection as developed by Jackson Mac Low. The output carries odd traces of its devising: “Sentences listened listened the the / The owner owner pines.” Sentences is a fascinating read as well as a classic computer-generated literary text. The uncanny and interesting source text fits the project well. Beyond that, there’s the remarkable combination of a generative technique that was more scientifically inspired by the properties of language with a selective one that is purely aesthetic.
December 31st, 2008 at 10:33 am
Has there been discussion here of the user’s manual that Kenner wrote for the Heath/Zenith Z-100 back in the early 1980s? It’s a weird little book . . .
December 31st, 2008 at 1:18 pm
dan, I’ve never heard of this, although I see there’s mention of the curious fact all over the Web. I could find little discussion of the book itself, though. How is it?
January 9th, 2009 at 8:29 am
[…] over at Grand Text Auto’s review of Sentences makes it sound like a book worth checking […]